I argue that shell scripts became more complicated because of quite the opposite of what you're claiming. The original Bourne shell already supported, piping, c

I argue that shell scripts became more complicated because of quite the opposite of what you're claiming. The original Bourne shell already supported, piping, control structures, etc. So people thought, hey, why design a new init system that does everything properly when we can just push all this logic to shell scripts and have them act as glue? It's the perfect example of "worse is better". They chose to keep the core init system simple, but as a result everything else became a complicated mess that doesn't handle corner cases properly. vidarh's comment is spot on.